Ben-Hur remake flops at the box office

New York — A big-budget remake of Ben-Hur was trampled under a herd of holdovers and new releases at the box office.

The Paramount Pictures release, which cost about $100m to make, debuted with just $11.4m, according to studio estimates Sunday.

That makes it one of the season's more pricy flops, albeit one that never had anything like the ambition of 1959's Charlton Heston epic.

See the trailer here:

Instead, Warner Bros.'s much-maligned DC Comics supervillain team-up film Suicide Squad held the top spot for the third straight week with an estimated $20.7m over its third weekend. It has now made $262.3m domestically (fourth best for the summer) despite steep declines and poor reaction from critics and fans alike.

Seth Rogen's foul-mouthed food animated comedy Sausage Party continued to do well for Sony Pictures. In its second weekend, it took in $15.3m, good enough for second place, and bringing its two-week total to $65.3m.

Two offbeat debuts slid in behind Suicide Squad and Sausage Party: the Iraq War comedy War Dogs, with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill; and the stop-motion animated Kubo and the Two Strings from Focus Features and Laika Entertainment.

War Dogs, the first movie after The Hangover trilogy for director Todd Phillips, was lambasted by critics, but it sold a decent $14.3m in ticket sales.

See the trailer here:

Kubo and the Two Strings, an acclaimed fantasy about a boy in ancient Japan, debuted with $12.6 million, the weakest opening of any film from Laika, the Oregon-based animation studio behind Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls. Kubo and the Two Strings was fashioned as Laika's most ambitious film yet, with the company's chief executive, Travis Knight, making his directorial debut.